The invention relates to a barrier which is easily opened and closed to close off access across a doorway, hallway or other throughway in a house or other domicile. More specifically, the invention is concerned with a portable barrier for a child or dog, in the form of a roll-up sheet or curtain on a vertical axis, of sufficient height to prevent a child or dog from crossing the barrier.
Infant barriers, or baby gates, have been known in several forms. The most common conventional configuration was a device assembled of a series of wooden slats pivotally connected in scissors fashion, so that the slats would stack together relatively compactly with the device retracted against a wall, but would extend across and close the opening when the outer end was pulled, causing all the slats to pivot to oblique, parallelogram-forming orientations. Problems with such baby gates included latches that were not totally secure, bulkiness when the barrier was retracted, and a tempting open web of rigid members which could be climbed by some young children.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,690,317, Sandsborg, shows a form of child barrier or baby gate of the general type with which this invention is concerned. That barrier included a curtain of material which extended from and retracted to a housing adjacent to one jamb of the device on a vertical roll-up axis. The barrier device had a mechanism which locked the curtain against further extension once the barrier was pulled beyond the other jamb and then was allowed to retract somewhat. This was a type of ratchet device that had to be manually released before the barrier could be retracted. The release device was not reliably childproof, and the barrier device did not seem to have adequate means for applying tension to the curtain-like barrier, in order to present a relatively solid wall to the child.
The invention described here provides an efficient, portable and reliable moveable gate for infants or dogs, for use in doorways, hallways, stair landings and other household positions and throughways to establish a safe barrier. The gate, formed of a flexible material which pulls out from a vertical-axis housing or frame in the spring-loaded manner of a window shade, has a jamb mounting at the housing end and a latch at the extended end of the curtain-like barrier. Both are releasable from a respective fixture which attaches to the door jamb, wall or stair rail post, so that the infant gate can be quickly released and moved to another location in the house where additional such jamb mountings are attached.
Important features of the barrier device are the manner in which the gate latches, a convenient handle for latching, a mechanism for tightening the curtain-like barrier into a nearly solid gate after it has been latched, and a childproof device for releasing tension in the gate when it is to be retracted.